Design, construction, and management of large-scale capital projects, such as process plants (e.g., oil refineries and pharmaceutical plants), power plants (e.g., a coal fueled power generation facility), ships (e.g., military shipping, cruise ships, or cargo ships), and off-shore oil platforms, requires coordination of processes and configuration data on a scale that is orders of magnitude greater than those of smaller, common projects (e.g., building and selling a ten room house). Large-scale capital projects consequently often require a substantially more comprehensive production and management solution.
In response to this need, those skilled in the art have developed comprehensive plant design programs (e.g., SmartPlant® Enterprise, distributed by Intergraph, Inc. of Huntsville, Ala.) that are specially configured for the rigors of such large capital projects. Among other things, this type of plant design program can be implemented as a broad application suite that manages most or all phases of a large-scale capital project, from initial conception, to design, construction, handover, maintenance, management, and decommissioning.
Plant design programs typically produce detailed 3D visualizations of their projects. Undesirably, such visualizations often have many components that are difficult to see on a relatively small monitor, such as a monitor on a tablet or other portable device.